Caleb's Crossing by Geraldine Brooks

I am a huge Geraldine Brooks fan, with 'The People of the Book' being my absolute favorite. She takes an historical setting and an event that occurred, and builds a story around it.
The time is 1660. Bethia is part of a pilgrim community that has broken away from John Winthrop’s colony in Massachusetts Bay and settled on Martha’s Vineyard. Her father is forward thinking and even handed--he doesn’t believe in stealing from or slaughtering the local Indians, but his family faces ridicule on both sides. Some of the native Wampanoag are distrustful, and some of the island immigrants would like to get rid of the indigenous population altogether.
Bethia is our heroine, and the novel is told from her point of view. She is explicitly told by her father that as a girl, she is not to be too educated--there is no point. So her duller brother, Makepeace, is being grommed to go to harvard, while she is sold into indentured servitude to help defray the cost of his education. Given her upbringing, she is not entirely in touch with her feelings, and she displays no anger at this situation. She laregely does what she is told. But not entirely. She befriends a native boy. She does recognize that she is quite fond of the boy, Cheeshahteaumauck, who is the nephew of the most powerful (and suspicious) local pawaaw, or priest-healer. Bethia thinks it may be this friendship, and the Wampanoag rituals she has allowed herself to witness out of curiosity (or what we may call intelligence and a sense of adventure), that has caused God to punish her by killing her mother. So she is a creature of her environment and her time, which gives the book an understated tone throughout. Her rebellion is to treat her Indian friend, who becomes known as Caleb, as an equal, someone who deserves the opportunities that any man would have in the new America. there were times reading this that I wished the narration was livlier, but then that would have been out of place for both the narrator and the story. It is wonderfully written, with a rich detail for the history of the period.